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Wave

The antidepressants steal sensation away. Most often you don’t notice it. But I noticed it today because I was feeling sad and alone all day, and there were chills up and down my back and neck, and it felt good. It was sadness, but it was a trembling sadness that felt good.

I finally found my meds because I knew it would help. I took one and twenty minutes later I felt the familiar wave of sorrow come to wash over me. And I embraced it, because when your existence consists mostly of sorrow you embrace it, it would be foolish not to. Our bodies are 70% water, my soul is probably at least 50% sorrow. It’s silly to push the sorrow away when it is itself your very existence. I reached out to take the wave in my arms and feel the chills run along my skin again.

But the antidepressant snatched me away from the sadness. It’s like jerking off, and then suddenly your hand is pulled away, and your cock is screaming out for more, but there’s only one small fraction of a second that it still feels pleasure without your hand, the rippling leftover waves of pleasure, and then the sinking combination of disappointment and frustration and anger that comes from not being allowed to continue, the receding of the pleasure, the bar was almost full and now it’s sunk to zero and you have to start again. That’s what it’s like when the antidepressant opens it’s mouth and eats the sorrow. It doesn’t eat the pain, or the damage to your nerves and your muscles. No, you still have to keep those. But it eats the sorrow, it eats the fun part. You do all the work of living with the pain and the antidepressant takes the solace of at least FEELING the pain.

But if you don’t have the antidepressant you can’t walk outside or go in public without the rolling waves of fear and panic. You can’t work a job. And before you know it you’ve gone from being 19 and living with your mother to being 27 and living with your mother, and if you don’t get out now then eventually you’ll be 35 and living with your mother, and then you’ll have begun to exhaust your options

The antidepressant is a necessary evil but it is an evil, because I love my waves of sorrow, and I want to catch it in my arms and feel my body tremble with a feeling that is not unlike an orgasm, where the sadness reaches deep into my stomach and even further past what I can pinpoint into an area in the back of my head where my best memories are kept. The best memories are not just the happy ones. The best memories are the ones where I feel most acutely. It’s easier to pinpoint the sad ones than the happy ones. Happy memories are difficult to find because happiness is difficult to notice. You don’t realize you were happy until you’re not anymore. Happiness is a pulse, it has to recede so it can keep beating. Happiness is a heartbeat.

You deal with the sinking in your chest. You feel violated, because that sadness I was about to feel was mine, and the medicine had no right to take it, and here it is inside of me, because I swallowed it of my own free will (but really, when you’re given a choice between functioning without a soul, or suffering with one, how is that even a choice? There is no answer), and it’s in places it shouldn’t be. I put the pill in my stomach but it’s made it’s way into the deeper places, into the cathedral that is my private place, and it’s snatching away my sadness which was never part of the agreement. I did not permit it to take the sadness.